i have followed a few guides on using video overlays to obtain a watermark. i am suppose to use the Bluescreen video effect along with the composite transition in kdenlive.
i run the following versions of software
lucid lynx 10.04
FFMPEG compiled from svn
x264 compiled from git
Kdenlive 7.7.1
Kino 1.3.4
melt 0.5.6 from a PPA
Medibuntu repos

my video I want the watermark over is a kino captured file which is dv avi type 2 (open dml). I have done Bluescreen video effect along with the composite transition but the video clip which the video watermark plays on top of ends up getting darker. for the bluescreen color i have chosen red which is the closest red i could pick next to the spinning logo. i'll have to edit keyframes I think to chose different colors as my watermark spinning logo animation video has a yellow in it later on the 2 minute .wmv video file that I want as my watermark. when I add the effect and tranisition the lighting changes on the video in slot 1, the watermark video is in slot 0, it gives the video an undesirable effect as far as how dark it it. i tried other colors but then the logo either disappears or the spinning logos black video background covers up my video. the reason for my "video" watermark is because it is a spinning logo (not a picture) which can be obtained in .wmv format here: http hupitgaming.com/hupit-army
goal is to put that on top of some xbox 360 modern warfare 2 gameplay. i haven't uploaded an example of how dark it makes the footage look yet but it does. any help as to what I am doing wrong or suggestions would be much appreciated. thank you.

Cannot download anything there ...

Either there's a problem with the link that was provided, or this is the most advanced spam I've ever witnessed...

not spam, need help with video watermark. files are here: http hupitgaming.com/hupit-army

I do not fully understand you description.
Why did you use red as color key? You want to key out the background, so it should be black?
To minimize darkening (if this is not avoidable why ever) you might crop the watermark video so that only a rectangle in the top right remains, which can than can be keyed.

using black as key color resulted in no watermark at all. i chose red cause the tut i watched said to pick a color as close to the color in the image i want watermarked. did you try it? that is why i posted the link to the video so that someone could maybe try what i am trying to help me out. any help would be appreciated.

good idea about cropping the watermark, i'll look into that but i imagine i will still have the problem with color choice and darkening of my main video that the watermark lays on top of.

I filed a bug report that I think is relevant to this.

http://kdenlive.org/mantis/view.php?id=1775

I tried using your watermark clip with key color set to black (rgb 0,0,0) and variance set to 4. I got transparency to work that way and I don't see any darkening of the bottom clip. Unfortunately white and grey pixels in the watermark turned transparent even though the key color is black and variance is very small. I don't know why that happens, I guess it's a bug.

I am using the most recent kdenlive and mlt as of this morning.

awesome, thank you so much for trying it. so the HG in the spinning logo disappears which makes it pretty much useless. this sux, i was hoping to be able to use linux and kdenlive for this.

The Select0r frei0r plugin can do it, just select black and invert.

I don't see a SelectOr video effect listed on my kdenlive. How is it accessed?

You need a recent version of Kdenlive.

If you can't compile that, install the latest Frei0r plugins, then take the "frei0r_select0r.xml" file from the Kdenlive sources and copy it to /usr/share/kde4/apps/kdenlive/effects/ (or wherever kdenlive effect files are kept on your system).

select0r is very new, maybe not best advice. And "Blue Screen" requires chroma information, which is lacking in black. In another thread, you mentioned a "screen" blend mode in Vegas for images with a black background. Well, we do have that, and it is old - not new. Just use the transition named "screen." Place the image with a black background on the track above the video and put the screen transition between them. If you need to control the size and position, then apply the "Pan and Zoom" effect to the watermark image.

Thanks for the info about the existing blue screen effect ddennedy. It definitely works differently than I expected it to. To me, and I think to most of non-video expert kdenlive users out there, black and white and shades of gray are very different "colors", so we intuitively expect the blue screen effect to do the right thing with them. Unfortunately it does not.

I think we need a video effect that is like the existing Blue Screen but it works based on rgb pixel values rather than the chroma/luma concept. If a pixel value in the image exactly matches the pixel value of the key then it turns transparent when variance == 0. If variance > 0 then pixels whose numeric rgb values are close to the key also turn transparent. The larger the variance the larger the matching window for the rgb values. Perhaps the variance can be controlled individually for red, green and blue. It would also be nice if this effect allows specifying the degree of transparency the pixels get when they match the key, although I know there already are other effects/transitions that allow controlling that. Maybe that's what SelectOr does already? I haven't tried SelectOr yet because apparently I need to install the most recent Frei0r plugins first. Will try to do that this weekend.

ddennedy,
you and the devs are da men!! i didn't even think to look for a screen transition I thought I had to use blue screen and composite the whole time due to seeing a youtube video using kdenlive where he had to do a watermark. it turned out good except it appears the text in the video watermark got really fuzzy. i'll post the link to the youtube upload when it's done. great software man.

I am not sure why the quality of the yellow flag with white lettering in it looks so horrid?? it's at about 1:45.
It's encoded with x264 and aac at 10,000 bite rate, 2 pass, forced progressive as my source is a firewire card and I shrink it to 640x480 from 720x480. also, i have another issue, due to the watermark video being really for HD (1280x720) and my source video being 720x480 and my end video being rescaled to 640x480, the logo is NOT in the top right corner. is there a way to move the 1280x720 upward using the screen transition or soemthing else so that it appears more in the top right corner like it was intended?
Here's the video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trlY60Zln-Q